III.

HISTORY AND HISTORIANS.*

THE reception of a new history worthy of the name, has cast our mind upon the reconsideration of some of those first principles of the historian's work, and historical science, which, even historians themselves have, perhaps, more frequently forgotten than remembered; principles, however, sure to be recalled to recollection by the devout student of history, even if the writer be remiss in directing attention; just as the cicerone may guide to the spot famous for its associations, and, unable either to narrate or to suggest, the visitor will not fail, in such a case, to supply the deficiency of the guide. Indeed, we do not expect the guide to make reflections to us; a suggestion may be pardoned, but more than this becomes tedious and impertinent; and the historian is not expected to be a homilist; but, we do demand of him that the narrative shall be so lucidly and completely written, that it becomes indeed its own commentator. The volumes of Dr. Motley are not to be dismissed with a slight and hurried notice; they narrate events, with which our traditions are too intimately blended, and conduct to conclusions, in which all lovers of freedom and of truth are too profoundly interested, for such treatment. They are a valuable contribution to our historical literature, and not less a delightful accession to our fireside reading. Next month we shall, with our readers, walk through this fine gallery of historic portraits, and attempt to set before them, concisely, the more distinctive events of that important period, the brave annals of which Dr. Motley has with so much freshness, and vigour, and interest recorded.

Historic writing is one of the most difficult, as it is one of the most dignified occupations of the human mind. It needs nearly all the qualities of genius, yet nothing is more certain than that more than genius is needed for the historian. The love of books; the patience of plodding research; the resolute burrowing among the driest earths

I. The Rise of the Dutch Republic; a History. By John Lothrop Motley. In Three Volumes. London: Geo. Routledge and Co.

I. History of the United Netherlands, from the death of William the Silent to the Synod of Dort. With a full view of the English-Dutch Struggle against Spain, and the Origin and Destruction of the Spanish Armada. Lothrop Motley, D.C.L. Vols. I., II. London: John Murray.

By John

III. The Limits of Exact Science, as applied to History. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Cambridge, by Charles Kingsley, M.A. Macmillan and Co., Cambridge.

andmost worthless accumulation of rubbish and chaff; the acquaintance, as a matter of course, with many languages; the power to strike through, and seize the weakest and strongest points of an event, an incident, a character; the power to grasp the outlines of many facts, to see as well their hidden meaning, and to group them so that there they lose their prosaic character, and are bodied forth in the light of graphic description, until it is difficult to discriminate the historian from the poet,-and yet, in the midst of all, to preserve the historian essentially and entirely distinct from the poet; to know precisely the relation the infinitely small in human affairs should bear to the almost infinitely large, and to keep the eye constantly fixed not only on the throne, and the throne room, but on the back-stairs leading to the throne room; to trace in human manners and customs the shifting web-work of human thought, and thus to be, not only little less than a poet of the highest wing, but little less than a metaphysician of the deepest and shrewdest comprehension;-making the pages, not only to flame with the hues of reality, but bringing into clear and unmistaken light the secret sophistries as well as the open sins of the human heart.

Hard, indeed, is the task of the historian; and few, very few, are the books we can truly call histories. The truth is, we have been in the habit of honouring many of the materials of history with that more general and honoured name. An antiquary is not a historian; a fact-collector is not a historian; nor is the poetic dreamer over facts or dates a historian. Colours and canvas will not make an artist. A grouping of dead materials in the most proper, but dead nomenclature-this is not history. History is that humanizing power, which, like a camera obscura, takes up, and causes to pass before the eye, the things, the events, with all their colours, all their hues, with all things cohering together in their proper proportions; it is the drama on a large scale. History is the drama of ages; it ought to contain all that the drama contains. The historian should use all men, and all things, from the song of the ballad-singer in the street, to the whisper of the minister of state in the council chamber. An old coin, or an old sabre, or an old coat in the room of an antiquary, or the faded portrait in the old ancestral gallery, obsolete customs and usages in retired villages, or the tariff and the scale of custom rates and charges, the architecture of the nobleman's palace, the worshipper's temple, or the peasant's hut, all are the materials of history. To the historian, the roar of the mob, to whom the mayor is about to read the Riot Act, is as important as the roll of cannon, and the blasts of trumpets on the distant field of battle. Attentively he notes the costumes of the times of old-as interesting to him as the autograph

dispatch of the sovereign of the times. He will not lose sight of the story of the population in such terms as Feudalism and Chivalry, but will determine to know how the people, as well as their masters, lived, what they did, what they refused to do; the colour and quality of their bread, and the state of the highway, will be to him matters of grave and momentous concern.

But these may be denominated the outer vesture and material of history. It is clear, that, a historian is not a mere dealer in the marine stores of nations. There is in all a moral purpose controlling the material aids. Dr. Arnold has defined one of the chief qualities of the historian to be, activity for truth and impatience of error. To present an age or a people as they were, this is the object of the historian. One would almost go the length of saying, that the historian should have no favourites-no heroes. He should be like the dramatist, in the distance he maintains towards personages and events. He is not to be the apologist, or he ceases to be the historian. He is not to be the partizan, or he ceases to be the historian. If he too prominently leads a hero on the field or on the page, he sinks his character, and from the historian becomes only the epic poet. In the world of actual life, it may be doubted if there be at any one time, any man who overrides and eclipses all other men. It is the historian's duty to show us how events linked themselves together, and grew out of each other. How the evil deed contained the evil seed. How the evil seed contained the evil fruit. How crime and fashion used its black crape and varnish, and vice its rouge. How the principles of public happiness were planted; how they matured and grew. How books were columns of light, or of cloud. How men were boons and blessings, or festering curses on the nation's heart. He must show all this, not by philosophising or expounding, but by narrating; he must place the stream of events in their own light, and make deeds, events, and men their own expositors.

Historians like Dr. Motley, or Lord Macaulay, remind us of the Judicial power of the Pen; in their hands, it becomes the true sceptre, mightier than the sword-mightier than the globe grasped by the monarch, the symbol of dominion and rule; it is the true arbiter. The pen confers immortality on princes when the hand is paralysed, and the ploughshare has passed over the place where once stood the throne of an illustrious dynasty. The pen will preserve the name of the prince in the literary and historic archives. The pen writes down the deeds of the great captain, whose sword swept like lightning round the nations of his day; he is not only conquered by death, he is conquered by the pen; his place in history waits on its award. Is it not very strange to think how we little men sit in judgment on the crimes, and the

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careers of those who would have made us tremble, who made the whole world tremble while they lived? Why, nothing can make us think of the great Marlborough but as a mean, pitiful, dastardly miser, a treason-hatching traitor who bought a place of power by the sale of his sister's honour, and maintained it by involving his country in debt that he might pocket the gains; who sold one sovereign, and was preparing to sell another; yes the pen enables us to say that. Thus the pen, the awful pen, sits, like an avenging fate, upon the memories of men, or stamps them with its irreversible seal. Is it not powerful? Is it not as wonderful as powerful? You see a prince like Henry the Eighth with the intellectuality of man and the will of a beast. You see a man like James the Second, who, in the menagerie of kings, may safely pass for our English hyena. You see creatures like Jefferies or Bonner, these men could make, did make, gloried in making poor, weak women tremble. You figure them, with blood-shot eye and white-lipped, or lipless mouths, and cruel tusks and teeth, glaring and gnashing for their victims, and champing over their thwarted will, or standing gloating over a bleeding corpse. How indignant you feel. Be quiet, be quiet, history has them all right; they are safely bound in the chains of the pen; they cannot, they shall not get free; they are fast. In the day of their power, how they would have sneered at the poor Grub-street crew! Who so contemptible as the poet, the historiographer, the chronicler? HIM, neither gartered, nor starred, nor titled. HIM! conciliate him! No, away, with him! Put him in the pillory, in the stocks, in prison. Away with him to the quartering knife of the hangman. See De Foe, standing in fact in the pillory, and composing a song in honour of it. See old Samuel Johnson scourged at the cart's tail through the streets of London. See Alice Lisle, venerable and glorious matron, led to the block. See Elizabeth Gaunt, sweet-hearted woman, led to the stake, for daring only to give bread to the hungry. See Bunyan in prison for twelve years, and George Fox in nearly all the prisons in England. See Russell, and Sydney on the block. Be quiet, be quiet, suppress your indignation, the memory of the victim and the tyrant are both in the keeping of the pen. Your pen is the true Lord Keeper of the consciences of all ages. It is the pen that haunts and dogs the steps of tyrants, with the everlasting Cassandra scream of execration. The pen raises against them the avenging hiss. The pen, in the hands of one they would have treated with contempt, is their judge,—jury,— sentence, and executioner.

Other reflections are forced upon us. History is just and cold. One of the chief lessons seems to be this, that Nature, and Time, and Providence serve, we had almost said they wait, upon man

dispatch of the sovereign of the times. He will not lose sight of the story of the population in such terms as Feudalism and Chivalry, but will determine to know how the people, as well as their masters, lived, what they did, what they refused to do; the colour and quality of their bread, and the state of the highway, will be to him matters of grave and momentous concern.

But these may be denominated the outer vesture and material of history. It is clear, that, a historian is not a mere dealer in the marine stores of nations. There is in all a moral purpose controlling the material aids. Dr. Arnold has defined one of the chief qualities of the historian to be, activity for truth and impatience of error. To present an age or a people as they were, this is the object of the historian. One would almost go the length of saying, that the historian should have no favourites-no heroes. He should be like the dramatist, in the distance he maintains towards personages and events. He is not to be the apologist, or he ceases to be the historian. He is not to be the partizan, or he ceases to be the historian. If he too prominently leads a hero on the field or on the page, he sinks his character, and from the historian becomes only the epic poet. In the world of actual life, it may be doubted if there be at any one time, any man who overrides and eclipses all other men. It is the historian's duty to show us how events linked themselves together, and grew out of each other. How the evil deed contained the evil seed. How the evil seed contained the evil fruit. How crime and fashion used its black crape and varnish, and vice its rouge. How the principles of public happiness were planted; how they matured and grew. How books were columns of light, or of cloud. How men were boons and blessings, or festering curses on the nation's heart. He must show all this, not by philosophising or expounding, but by narrating; he must place the stream of events in their own light, and make deeds, events, and men their own expositors.

Historians like Dr. Motley, or Lord Macaulay, remind us of the Judicial power of the Pen; in their hands, it becomes the true sceptre, mightier than the sword-mightier than the globe grasped by the monarch, the symbol of dominion and rule; it is the true arbiter. The pen confers immortality on princes when the hand is paralysed, and the ploughshare has passed over the place where once stood the throne of an illustrious dynasty. The pen will preserve the name of the prince in the literary and historic archives. The pen writes down the deeds of the great captain, whose sword swept like lightning round the nations of his day; he is not only conquered by death, he is conquered by the pen; his place in history waits on its award. Is it not very strange to think how we little men sit in judgment on the crimes, and the